Autor: Schindler, David C., Jun

Buch: The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: The Catholicity of Reason

Stichwort: Nichtwissen - Anmaßung 3; wissenschaftlicher Reduktionismus; Isolierung eines Teils vom Ganzen -> stets Aussage über d. Ganze (Beispiel: Dawkins, Bewusstsein - Gehirntätigkeit); Unterschied: Wissenschaft- Szientismus; falsche Bescheidenheit

Kurzinhalt: ... the only way finally to avoid scientific reductionism is to recover within science a more self-conscious sense that one is not studying only a part, but rather the whole, even if it is in a particular respect.

Textausschnitt: 26a To make this argument more concrete, let us consider the general status of scientific reasoning in the present age. Modern science was born precisely as a result of the kind of self-limitation of reason that we have been discussing. Galileo was revolutionary for criticizing what he took to be the presumption of classical philosophy to see into the "essences" of things. He thus proposed, instead, to "bracket out," as it were, the metaphysical question of "what" things are, and to attend only to the mathematically formulizable laws that govern their locomotion, laws that reveal themselves only to controlled experiment. The "conceit" of modern science, as generally understood, is this: we can learn a lot about the world, or at least about how the world works, if we abstract one feature of reality — i.e., quantifiable change — which we rationally master as far as we are able, and we leave the "big questions" concerning meaning, ethical implications, and so forth, to the philosophers and theologians. Now, the precise relationship between science, philosophy, and theology is of course a vast one, and we are not claiming to do it justice here (and, note, we are able thus to limit ourselves because we know it is a vast question!), but we wish only to observe the following: there has been a concern, from the very beginning of this sort of thinking, that this position, in spite of its explicit modesty, tends to encroach upon the "big questions" and in fact to impose certain answers to those questions. What we wish to propose, in the light of the discussion above, is that this encroachment is inevitable because it is "built into" the logic of epistemological modesty. (Fs)

26b Along the lines we have been arguing, to say that one is attending only to the quantifiable aspect of change and that one is setting aside the philosophical question about the essence of a thing, or in other words to isolate this particular part from the whole, entails three claims: first, that the larger question about the nature of a thing does not bear on its movements in a way that might require a grasp of that nature properly to detect;1 second, that this movement is not and indeed cannot be transformed in subtle but significant ways according to the context; and, third, that what is "bracketed out" is extrinsic to what one is studying, in abstraction, so that the whole at issue represents a mere addition of "all the rest" to the part that had been isolated. Note that one cannot isolate the part in this absolute way without making a judgment, willy-nilly, about the nature of the whole of which it is a part — and indeed to do so in spite of one's professed ignorance. The isolation and the presumptuous judgment are one and the same act. Let us take an example, which is admittedly extreme but thereby serves to make the point in big letters. Richard Dawkins "modestly" confesses ignorance regarding the nature of consciousness, and sets this question aside in order to restrict himself to what one could call the mechanics of brain activity.2 In doing so, he presumes from the outset, and so without reason or argumentation, that consciousness qua consciousness has nothing to do with what goes on in the brain. This strictly baseless assumption excludes from the outset the possibility consciousness might be an integral whole that includes the brain in its mechanical dimension even as it transcends it. Instead, because it requires conceiving consciousness as external to the mechanics of brain activity, Dawkins's starting assumption leaves only two alternatives: either consciousness is a product of the mechanics or it is a "ghost in the machine," i.e., some kind of "supernatural" entity one may or may not privately believe in, independently of one's scientific thinking.3 The methodological practice of setting aside the question of the nature of consciousness is willy-nilly a positive claim about the nature of consciousness; because it makes this claim without acknowledging it and accepting responsibility for it, the practice is inherently presumptuous, regardless of the moral character of the scientist or his explicit intentions in adopting the methodology. (Fs)

28a Of course, an adequate treatment of everything implied here would require a much lengthier discussion that would elaborate responses for the many evident objections one could make. But our intention in the present context is simply to recognize a recurring pattern. A common response to what we are describing is to make a distinction between science, the systematic study of empirical facts, and "scientism," which is the confusion of science with philosophy, the assumption that the part one studies under specific conditions gives an adequate understanding of the whole. In other words, science limits itself to the study of matter in motion; scientism says that matter in motion "is all there is." As long as scientists stick to the "how," it is said, and do not presume to answer the question "why," then science poses in principle no threat to philosophy or religion. But we wish to suggest, by contrast, that the only way finally to avoid scientific reductionism is to recover within science a more self-conscious sense that one is not studying only a part, but rather the whole, even if it is in a particular respect. In other words, the problem is not that certain scientists fail to adhere to the modesty that defines the scientific project; the problem lies in the modesty itself. Scientific reasoning will have humility only to the extent that it understands itself (once again) as a philosophy. In more technical language, we might say that reason is always inevitably "of being." Scientific reasoning, to be truly a mode of reasoning, would thus be of being, but in a particular respect: being qua that which changes in a quantifiable manner (or however one might need to specify in the particular context). If it "pretends" to be only the study of quantifiable motion qua quantifiable motion, it in fact identifies being with this particular respect, which is to say that it makes its object an unconditional absolute in itself, and so indifferent to anything outside of itself. The moment reason admits that it is philosophical, which means acknowledges it is a particular way of accounting for the whole, it then opens up from within to dialogue with the other accounts of the whole, because it is now responsible to that whole; it becomes "vulnerable" to the truth of the whole in a way that its self-proclaimed "modesty" precisely protected it from ever being. Ironically, the more one insists on modesty in science, the more "impenetrable" one makes it, i.e., the more one makes it an absolute in itself and so unable to be integrated into a larger whole. To set any absolute limit not only keeps reason from exceeding a boundary, it necessarily also keeps anything else from getting in. (Fs) (notabene)